Alana Smith
I am watching my husband, who isn’t handy at all, saw through a tree. He is lying on his side, with his top half engulfed by a Christmas pine of some sort. I can hear his grumbles and grunts as he yells, “WHY are we doing this again?”
“It’s our new Christmas tradition!” I exclaim.
My two young boys are flat on the ground as well, pretending to be of assistance to their father.
“Get it, Dad! Saw right here!”
“Let me try, Dad! Can I use the saw? My turn!”
When I had the idea to take my family to the tree farm last year, and cut down a real, live, Christmas tree, it seemed like a great idea. We’ve always purchased a live tree, but we have never been the ones to cut it down. We always left that to the professionals. But, it seemed like an adventure of sorts, and one that my boys would love to do, year after year.
An adventure is one word for what we were experiencing.
There were rows and rows of trees. Christmas trees galore! I was excited at first, but as we walked the rows and side-stepped muddy puddles, I realized the trees didn’t look as good up close. Some were leaning a bit, or a tad too short. Some were bare in the back. And some just would not do.
I was trying to be optimistic as I said, “They do have a lot of character!”
My six-year-old stopped at his tree of choice. “Mom, this one looks good!”
And it did, for the most part. So, we set about cutting this chosen tree down. It was much harder than one might have imagined. By the time my husband had the trunk sawed through, his pants were covered in dirt, sap coated his palms, and pine needles littered his hair. I couldn’t help but laugh, but I knew this was not going to be a fun tradition for him.
My boys were also quite dirty from laying on the ground as well, watching the action, so our dirt-covered bunch headed to my SUV with our new tree in tow.
After a lot of effort and exasperation, my husband tied the tree to the top of our vehicle. Off we drove, with my hand sticking out of the sunroof and into the pine to make sure it stayed put.
Once we arrived home, our boys raced inside, already interested in other things.
I cleared a spot for our new tree, got the stand ready, and my husband drug the tree into
the house.
I had never seen an uglier tree.
“Is this the same tree?” I wondered. This tree looked completely different as it stood alone, next to our lamp, without all of its tree companions. This tree was full at the bottom, and grew quite skinny up top, and the top curved over just a bit as if it was straight out of Whoville. I didn’t notice the curved top at the farm, as I guess they all looked this way.
“How will the star stay on top?”
This was apparently a cypress tree, and not the traditional Fraser Fir, I was expecting. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this while we were picking a tree, but I didn’t. And the branches were the floppiest things I’d ever seen. My beloved ornaments would never hold. I doubted the lights would even stand a chance.
I knew I had to make the most of it, because if I asked my husband to head to Lowe’s for a different tree, he may never return. So, I got busy. I did manage to get the lights on this crazy tree, but most of the ornaments were too heavy. I picked my favorite few—my boys’ handprint ornaments, a sparkly donut ornament, and our first ornament as a married couple, and hung them on the one sturdy branch I could find. The rest of the tree was decorated with paper ornaments from my boys’ preschool, which gave it a very homemade feel.
I stepped back to inspect this ridiculous tree. It was so bare and nothing like our normal Christmas tree. I called in my boys, and told them that this tree needed some garland. And they were to make it. I went to gather some construction paper, and almost cried when I remembered we had used it all during a Thanksgiving craft. I grabbed my only option, white printer paper, and told them we would “decorate our own!” and we started to create. They colored scribbles and stripes and nothing that resembled Christmas, other than the red and green marker choice.
I cut the strips out and then stapled together the rings. After about four feet of garland, my boys lost interest, like they usually do. So we hung up our four foot creation, which went exactly one time around the tree. This tree now had a few lights, a few ornaments, and one strip of homemade garland.
It was ugly.
It was leaning.
It was sparse.
But it was our tree.
A few days later, the majority of the needles fell off the tree. It was a horrendous mess, and it was a Charlie Brown tree now, for sure. And there was nothing to do about it except laugh, and try not to touch it. I probably yelled, “Don’t touch the tree!” at least 50 times last year.
This year, we won’t be heading back to the tree farm. We will leave that to some other unsuspecting parents. But we will always remember and laugh at the year that we picked a regular old cypress tree as a Christmas tree. It was our ugly, messy, homemade tree.
And it was an adventure for sure.
Alana is a nurse anesthetist, writer and boy mom (ages 7 and 2), who lives in north Shelby County with her husband, kids and Boxer, Sam. When she’s not writing or chasing little humans, she can usually be found in the aisles of Target. She shares her writings at Holy Moly Motherhood (on Facebook and Instagram), where she takes on all things motherhood and marriage.
